Julie Robinson Belafonte, dancer, activist, 95
Julie Robinson Belafonte, a dancer, actress and, with singer Harry Belafonte, one half of an interracial power couple who used their high profiles to aid the civil rights movement and the cause of integration in the United States, died on March 9 in Los Angeles. She was 95.
Her death, at an assisted living facility in the Studio City neighborhood, was announced by her family. She had resided there for the last year and nine months after living for decades in New York City.
Ms. Belafonte, who was white and the second wife of Harry Belafonte, the Black CaribbeanAmerican entertainer and activist, had an eclectic career in the arts. At various times she was a dancer, a choreographer, a dance teacher, an actress, and a documentary film producer.
Ms. Belafonte traveled the nation and the world with her husband and their children during Harry Belafonte’s sellout concert tours in the late 1950s and ’60s, presenting an image of a close interracial family that was otherwise rarely seen on television or in newspapers and magazines.
She was at Harry Belafonte’s side when they planned and hosted fund-raisers for civil rights groups, including the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference and the more militant Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.
Harry Belafonte died last April at 96, and during a memorial service for him this month, at Riverside Church in Manhattan, Julie Belafonte’s efforts were remembered by their son, David Belafonte. “She marched, she endured racial hatred and abuse through the years,” he told the crowd, “when a high-profile relationship between a Black man and a white woman was seriously risky business.”
Julia Mary Robinson was born on Sept. 14, 1928, in Washington Heights in Manhattan to Clara and George Robinson, both of whom had Russian Jewish roots. She was raised in what she called “an interracial environment,” reared by liberal parents and going to school with both Black and white children, she told the magazine Redbook in 1958. She attended the High School of Music and Art in Manhattan (now the Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts), where she was an art student.
Around the age of 16, she won a scholarship to the newly opened Katherine Dunham School of Dance in Manhattan and dropped out of high school to pursue a dance career. (She later earned her GED diploma.) She soon worked her way up to student-teacher at the school; among her students were Marlon Brando and Alvin Ailey, who was to gain fame as a dancer, choreographer, and director.
When an opening came up at Dunham’s renowned all-Black dance company in the mid1940s, she auditioned in Philadelphia and was hired as its first white member.
“I never thought she’d integrate her company,” she recalled in an interview with the radio station WBAI in 2015, “but I knew I was a good dancer.”
Recognizable for her dark eyes, olive skin, and black hair, which she wore in a distinctive ponytail or in pigtails that fell nearly to her waist, she toured the world with the Dunham dancers, sometimes rooming with her fellow dancer Eartha Kitt, before Kitt became a celebrated singer and actress.
When the company was barred from hotels because of race, a not-infrequent occurrence in the United States and abroad, Ms. Belafonte insisted on staying wherever the other dancers stayed. She remained with the company for seven years.
By the early 1950s, her parents had moved to Los Angeles, and Ms. Belafonte wound up in Hollywood, helping to choreograph dance sequences in at least one film and later obtaining small parts in a few others, including “Mambo,” a 1954 drama set in Italy and produced by Dino De Laurentiis and Carlo Ponti, and “Lust for Life,” the 1956 biopic about Vincent Van Gogh starring Kirk Douglas and Anthony Quinn. By then she was going by Julie rather than Julia.
She met Harry Belafonte on the set of “Carmen Jones,” the 1954 movie musical in which he starred opposite Dorothy Dandridge, introduced to him by Brando, a good friend of Harry Belafonte’s. She had dated Brando off and on for several years after appearing with him in a touring production of “A Streetcar Named Desire.”
She and Harry Belafonte became lovers, although he was still married to Margurite Belafonte, a Black schoolteacher and psychologist. He and Margurite (her given name has also appeared as Marguerite) separated shortly after, although in public they maintained the trappings of a happy marriage for the sake of his skyrocketing career.
Their marriage ended in divorce, in Las Vegas, in February 1957. Eight days later, Harry Belafonte, about to turn 30, and Ms. Belafonte, who was pregnant at 28, married in Mexico, Harry Belafonte wrote in his 2011 book, “My Song: A Memoir of Art, Race, and Defiance.”
They had sought at first to keep the marriage a secret to protect Harry Belafonte’s two young daughters, Adrienne and Shari, with his first wife, he wrote. But white gossip columnists and the Black press were hot on their trail, forcing his publicist to announce the marriage.
Interracial marriage was uncommon in America then — half the states still legally barred it — and the fact that Harry Belafonte had divorced a Black woman and so quickly married a white one carried the whiff of scandal. While the liberal entertainment circles in which the Belafontes traveled largely accepted the union, Harry Belafonte faced harsh criticism elsewhere, especially in the Black press, where some columnists disparaged him as a rich, successful Black man who was no longer content with a Black wife.
By then a well-known supporter of civil rights and integration, he took to the pages of Ebony, the leading African American magazine, writing an essay to proclaim that race had nothing to do with the marriage. “I believe in integration and work for it with all my heart and soul,” he wrote. “But I did not marry Julie Robinson to further the cause of integration. I married her because I was in love with her and she married me because she was in love with me.”
The commotion eventually died down, and Ms. Belafonte put her career aside to start a family in Manhattan. But racial animus still trailed them. When their first child, David, was born in the fall of 1957, they received racist hate letters. “My first child,” she recalled in the WBAI interview. “Can you imagine?”
For months the Belafontes were unable to obtain a larger apartment in Manhattan because landlords and real estate agents refused to rent to an interracial couple, a predicament that made headlines. They eventually found an apartment on West End Avenue, where they lived for decades.
Their daughter, Gina, was born in 1961, and the family was frequently photographed as they arrived at airports during concert tours, took vacations, or posed for newspaper and magazine profiles, helping to destigmatize interracial marriage in the United States.
As Harry Belafonte’s role in the civil rights movement deepened, so did Ms. Belafonte’s.
At the Selma to Montgomery civil rights march in Alabama in 1965, in which both Belafontes participated, it was Ms. Belafonte who told orange-jacketed private security forces that the ordinary citizens of Selma deserved to be at the front of it, ahead of the celebrities and dignitaries, and that’s where they were placed.
The Belafontes divorced in 2007, and Ms. Belafonte kept a lower profile thereafter. In her later years she produced two documentaries, “Ritmo del Fuego” (2006), about African cultural heritage in Cuba and the Caribbean, and “Flags, Feathers and Lies” (2009), about the resilience of the Mardi Gras Indian tradition in New Orleans.
Following Margurite Belafonte Mazique’s death in 1998, Ms. Belafonte assumed the role of family matriarch, not only to her own children but to those from Harry Belafonte’s first marriage, Adrienne Belafonte Biesemeyer and Shari Belafonte. All of the children survive her, as well as three grandchildren.